1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management system for performing document management at the time of executing a workflow, or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Nowadays, there is great interest in activities and laws for proving that a company/organization is managed properly with regard to internal control and so forth. Information technology for business operations processes is being developed to handle such activities and laws, wherein a procedure for achieving document creation and a business operation is determined beforehand, and whether work is carried out in accordance with the procedure is monitored, which can be proved in the case of audit. With a system provided here, not only various types of document products obtained according to the progress of business operations, but also the management of progress status, become important.
Therefore, a workflow system which can be customized according to the business operations of each company has been provided, wherein each of all the business operation processes starts work by employing a user interface provided by the workflow system, and is completed on the workflow system.
On the other hand, there is a need to manage a document created during business operations, and a document generated at each process to achieve business operations, so a great number of document management systems for providing a workflow function have been proposed.
However, in reality, there are cases where work cannot be realized at all of the processes with a customized workflow system or on document management system application for providing a workflow function. An example of such a case is where with one process of all the processes, creation of a document itself is performed by employing a document creation application such as Office (registered trademark) manufactured by Microsoft Corporation, or a case where paper media is a product.
As a conventional example for solving such a case, there has been proposed a business operation support system for providing a workflow function of which the object is to execute a business operation flow smoothly by correlating electronic data obtained by scanning paper documents existing at each business operations flow with the corresponding business operations flow (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-200136).
With such a business operation support system, IDs for determining business operations and documents are embedded as control information at the time of printing on paper at each process, and at the time of scanning printed paper, the processing proceeds to the next action stipulated by the control information beforehand, thereby realizing a business operation flow employing paper documents.
A document created as a product at each process of a business operation flow is commonly approved through a great number of persons until a process wherein the document is issued as an official document.
With Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-200136, a different document creation phase is provided at each process of a business operation flow, and accordingly, consideration regarding a flexible process management at the time of one document becoming an official version is not sufficient. Further, with regard to the operation content of a document at each process, this system is not a system which can be provided to a user readily.
Also, with the control information of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-200136, and a stipulated business operation flow, only an arrangement for proceeding to the next process has been disclosed, an in a case where there is sending back due to a defect given in information or the like at each process, there is no function wherein the process returns to the previous process, and after a correction, the business operation flow can be resumed. Accordingly, the business operation flow is discarded once regardless of the progress status, and consequently, a document is created based on a new business operation flow.